Tolkien Gleanings #459
* A new issue of the journal Mythlore is now online and freely available, the Fall/Winter 2026 issue. This includes, among other items…
– “With Axe, Knife, Sting, and Tooth: The Enduring Wounds of Gawain and Frodo.”
– “Dreaming of Bag End: The Hobbit and Medieval Dream-Poetry.”
– “Oxford at War: ‘Leaf by Niggle’ as a Wartime Work, Part 1.”
Books reviews include, among others, a review of Tolkien’s Glee: A Reading of the Songs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
* The Dwarrow Scholar has a new and long article on “Dwarvish Astronomy: Under Stone, Under Stars”.
* From the Oxford Tolkien Network, a new article on the preparations for the Tolkien Memorial at Westminster Abbey. Also, I note that their website says that the seminar talks have been put on hold… “In Michaelmas Term 2026, there will be no Tolkien seminar” presentations. But there will be one guest lecture.
* John Garth is now embarking on his Oxford Tolkien DPhil, researching “Myth-making and war from 1919 to the Atomic Era: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in its time”.
* Holly Orway’s Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-Earth Beyond the Middle Ages (2021) has just appeared in Spanish translation.
* The latest issue of the journal Fandom | Cultures | Research has a book review for The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children‘s Literature, and Fandom in Putin’s Russia (2025). The focus of the book is very much on Harry Potter and its franchise, but the reviewer notes in passing… “His analysis of how The Lord of the Rings prepared the ground for fantasy in Russia is strong”.
* Forthcoming from Bloomsbury in November 2026, The Ancient World in Rock Music: Playing the Classics in the 1960s and 1970s. Possibly somewhat Tolkien relevant is the chapter titled “Magic, Mythology, and Nostalgia in Marc Bolan’s Carnivalesque World”.
* A pre-print for the academic book chapter “Fear of the Forest: Cultural Xylophobia from Pliny to Proulx”.
* And finally, I can add one more old use of the word “bilbo”. Many of the pre-Tolkien uses have of course been surveyed. Among others, by Mark T. Hooker in the lead essay in his essay collection The Hobbitonian Anthology. But I don’t believe the following item from England in 1599 has been noted before. Half way though Shakespeare’s well known play Henry V (1599) the audience encounters the English King’s future French wife, the young Catherine of Valois. She is in a castle garden, being taught the rudiments of English by her nurse. She repeats the body-part names she has just heard for the first time, and comically mis-names the elbow, e.g…
KATHERINE: Ecoutez [listen]: d’hand, de fingre, de nailes, d’ arma, de bilbow.
She then mis-names it a second time, despite having been corrected the first time, for even more audience chuckles.
For a stage audience the word would have been heard as “bilbo”. Admittedly Tolkien was apparently rather averse to Shakespeare’s ‘history plays’, so it seems an unlikely unconscious source. But I thought I’d add it to the pile of “bilbo” possibilities.